i remember back in 2001 or 2002 when i started to get really interested in japan, i would read the mainichi daily news website every day to keep up to date on what was happening in japan. the news wasn’t only interesting, but it made for good conversation with japanese girls and the knowledge of international news made me seem more worldly (or at least i thought so).

the mainichi daily news site was supposed to be direct translations from their japanese site. for the most part the news articles were decent, although they really liked to use puns and corny headlines. i even emailed them a couple of times complaining about it, but never got a response.

along with the regular news, they’d have a weekly article from the “waiwai” section that had some pretty raunchy articles with the sleeziest headlines. they were always about crazy things like mother-daughter prostitute teams and why japanese guys don’t like to go down on girls. anyway, i always found these pretty entertaining, but i guess everyone else didn’t feel the same way, with some feeling that the site portrayed japanese as deviant sex maniacs (ummm…) the site also apparently had some strange meta tags to drive sketchy traffic like “hentai”, “japanese girls” and “ganguro” (all meta keywords for kentomatic btw =p). after some complaints and then an internal investigation, the shit hit the fan, and people got fired.

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if you saw the opening ceremony at the 2008 olympics in beijing, i’m sure you’d agree that it was one of the most amazing presentations in the history of the games. to be honest, since it was all “made in china,” i was just waiting for some of the technology to fail or for pieces of the stadium to fall apart. but to their credit, it all went off without a hitch and was impressive as hell. the synchronization of the drums, and coordination of so many performers kept me glued in my seat up until the lengthy and boring entering of the athletes segment.

something that was mentioned by the commentators during the opening ceremony presentation was that the 2008 chinese drummers were told to smile more during their performance. for some countries, seeing that many chinese performing together with such precision did seem a bit militaristic and frightening, and while those types of performers never smile, they did during the olympics to make them look less menacing to those countries who might be afraid of them.

taka, who frequently reads japanese and other asian blogs told me that for the most part, the smiling failed to serve its purpose. japanese and most other asian countries who have similar customs (where those types of performers never smile) said that seeing 2008 chinese performers drumming together in perferct synchronization, while sporting a creepy-forced smile just made it look that much more frightening and threatening to them. so much for trying to make people comfortable.